Turning Point

By: Danielle Steel

Narrated by: Todd McLaren

In Danielle Steel’s powerful new novel, four trauma doctors - the best and brightest in their field - confront exciting new challenges, both personally and professionally, when given an unusual opportunity.

Bill Browning heads the trauma unit at San Francisco’s busiest emergency room, SF General. With his ex-wife and daughters in London, he immerses himself in his work and lives for rare visits with his children. A rising star at her teaching hospital, UCSF at Mission Bay, Stephanie Lawrence has two young sons, a frustrated stay-at-home husband, and not enough time for any of them. Harvard-educated Wendy Jones is a dedicated trauma doctor at Stanford, trapped in a dead-end relationship with a married cardiac surgeon. And Tom Wylie’s popularity with women rivals the superb medical skills he employs at his Oakland medical center, but he refuses to let anyone get too close, determined to remain unattached forever.

These exceptional doctors are chosen for an honor and a unique project: to work with their counterparts in Paris in a mass-casualty training program. As professionals, they will gain invaluable knowledge from the program. As ordinary men and women, they will find that the City of Light opens up incredible new possibilities, exhilarating, enticing, and frightening.

When an unspeakable act of mass violence galvanizes them into action, their temporary life in Paris becomes a stark turning point: a time to face harder choices than they have ever made before - with consequences that will last a lifetime.

©2019 Danielle Steel (P)2019 Recorded Books

The ending was too abrupt - missed opportunities

lost my interest about 2/3 in. character development was not as robust as it could have been

Narrator

I really wish it didn’t bother me, but the narrator kept pronouncing the word forte as fort. Super annoying.

Romantic

A well written love story. Narrator did an excellent job of reading the story in 2 languages, both male and female voices of about 8 characters. I do love France. Enjoyed the story.

Timely story

In true Danielle Steel fashion there is something for almost everyone in this book. The subject matter is current, real and seemingly plausible. Four American Doctors are invited to France teach and learn from their four French counterparts with a reciprocal trip soon after. The setting is one we are sadly all to familiar with these days. I write this as a terrorist just shot up a Christmas village in Europe and there is an international man hunt for him. I enjoyed almost everyone in the book. The 2 characters I found not only annoying, but that they in some way detracted from the story were Stephanie and Gabriel. Other than being good medical professionals they have no likable qualities. She is dismissive of her husband and his "little" job, absolutely thinks she is better than he is, believes that because she lived through her dad being a dr and never being around that it is fine for her boys too and that they'll "be fine" and won't even remember her not being around. And she gives so little credit to her husband for picking up the slack. Just because her father was never around and she is "fine" doesn't make her behavior or mothering okay. I see lots of therapy in their future and few visits to their mom when they are grown men. Does her job save lives yes. Does it give her the right to be so dismissive no. To be treated equally doesn't require that she has to take on the persona of a 1950's man. Gabriel is an opportunistic unlikable man. He is honest and that goes in the plus side. He wants her to give up everything. Her life in the US, her ability to practice medicine and he doesn't want to divorce his wife because that "isn't the way the French do things" Seriously. They actually deserve each other and Stephanie's husband deserves better. Aside from those two I adored the book. The characters all interesting and smart. We get to see them transform from chapter to chapter in lovely ways. They grow as people as friends and as doctors. Even with two awful people it is a book worth reading. It isn't often that there are detestable characters in her novels and if there is they usually come out the other side better or healed. These two did not. Fortunately the rest did and made it well worth the read.

not bad

story was good could have been deeper. I stayed with it to see the characters to the end despite an extremely boring narrator!! That was my number 1 complaint, he should not read aloud!